Science & Society
SCTODAY
Society News 2021
April 02, 2021
Mapping policy for how the EU can reduce its impact on...
EU imports of products contribute significantly to deforestation in other parts of the world. In a new study, published in One Earth, researchers from several universities worldwide, among...
March 25, 2021
Are bats responsible for the coronavirus? It’s not...
Since the beginning of the pandemic, bats have been blamed for transmitting the SARS-Cov-2 virus to humans. There is no scientific proof that this is true. Meanwhile, the...
March 18, 2021
Parental burnout linked to Western individualism
Parental exhaustion is universal. Stress-related suffering in parenting has received increased attention in recent years. Are parents in certain countries more affected by the...
Society News 2020
October 01, 2020
Science and health
Just a number at work? Beware of the dangers
Beware of organisational dehumanisation. The phenomenon, which has been studied for some years by work and organisational psychology researchers, is spreading, and causing...
September 22, 2020
Environment
Eco-responsibility: child’s play
Today’s children are tomorrow’s adults and decision-makers. And in this world in transition, they can shake things up from an early age, for example, by protecting our planet. How?...
July 24, 2020
Environment
Trade: tomorrow’s sustainable sectors?
How can we make global trade more sustainable? By measuring the stability and intensity of the relationships between actors in raw material supply chains and production areas. Patrick...
July 16, 2020
Environment
Radioactive fallout contamination in Europe
A high-resolution spatial map reveals the distribution of soil contamination in Europe by Caesium 137 from nuclear tests and the Chernobyl accident. It’s a radio-element harmful to health but...
July 07, 2020
Society
Opinion or hate speech?
In Belgium, discriminatory comments are punishable by law. But what is to be done when the words are at the borderline between opinion and hate speech? The team of UCLouvain linguist...
July 16, 2020
Environment
Under Taal volcano’s ash
Volcanic ash and agriculture don’t mix. In early January, the Philippines’s Taal volcano, one of the world’s most dangerous, suddenly erupted, causing significant damage to crops and brutally...
June 25, 2020
Satellite view of COVID-19 impact reveals struggling...
What’s the connection between white asparagus, soft fruit, plastic tarps, and trucks? Each had a role in recent satellite image analysis that shows a major indirect impact of COVID-19....
April 02, 2020
"Great shocks, vectors of technical progress"
David De la Croix, specialist in the field of economic growth and demographic economics, just won a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. On the midst of coronavirus...
March 31, 2020
Health
The great dilemma: isolate or immunise
Modelling the impact of isolation measures is what authorities turn to when making decisions concerning COVID-19. UCLouvain researcher Emmanuel Hanert has adapted a mathematical model...
April 02, 2020
Society
Did scholars make the West?
Were scientists and scholars crucial to the West’s growth and development? Research at the crossroads of demography, economics, and history got the go-ahead on 31 March, when economist David...
March 13, 2020
Science and technology
Radar for malicious drones
Anyone can use a drone. Their use is increasingly varied, to the point of endangering our privacy and security. UCLouvain and VTT Aalto in Finland researchers, studied several drones from...
March 10, 2020
Free will or biological determinism?
Neuroscience supports the existence of free will. This is demonstrated in Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience, coedited by Bernard Feltz, professor emeritus at the UCLouvain Graduate...
February 11, 2020
Society
Volunteering is good for your health!
Giving your time makes you feel better and keeps the doctor away! These are the results of a vast Belgian study on the benefits of volunteering led by researchers from the UCLouvain...
January 21, 2020
New technologies
Online platforms and copyrights
Maxime Lambrecht has created a YouTube channel to popularise Internet law, intellectual property and theories of justice, which has been awarded the Wernaers Prize for popular science. Let’s...
Society News 2019
December 11, 2019
Society
Working with companies to build a better world for work
The LaboRH Chair, created eight years ago, is a unique entity at UCLouvain aimed at helping scientists and companies collaborate to create tomorrow’s world of work. The Presses Universitaires...
December 10, 2019
Five keys to communal living
Personal fulfilment, moral support, solidarity: communal living is on the rise, especially among the elderly. But it’s not always easy to live together when we forget what drives the...
November 21, 2019
‘Next generation’ separated families
For more than two years, Prof. Laura Merla has been leading research on societal changes in divorced families. Member of the UCLouvain Institute for the Analysis of Change in Contemporary and...
November 19, 2019
The puzzle of pensions is in good hands
Demographic change obliges all governments to address the issue of pensions. Prof. Pierre Devolder has just created the Ethias Chair of Excellence and, with other colleagues, an...
November 05, 2019
A late antiquity Tuscan villa revealed
For 13 summers, Marco Cavalieri, UCLouvain professor of Roman archaeology and researcher at the Intitute for the study of civilizsations, arts and letters (INCAL), and his team have conducted...
October 24, 2019
Environment
Big data: cartography the pulsations of a territory
2019 Fellow Award of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), Isabelle Thomas reflects on her unconventional journey.
‘What fascinates me? Using geo-localised data to...
October 22, 2019
Does everyone benefit from sharing platforms?
Prosecco is the Italian sparkling white wine. PROSEco is a research programme that tries to establish whether the economic model of Airbnb and Uber sharing platforms is sustainable for all...
October 16, 2019
Society
What will work be like tomorrow?
Co-working, telecommuting, robotisation, digitisation, individualisation – the world of work is changing. Convinced that these changes and their effects in terms of health, work and space are...
September 19, 2019
Environment
Biodiversity: an emergency
We’ll talk a lot about biodiversity this fall at UCLouvain but from an angle that is not often assumed: focusing on the interactions – we wouldn’t dare write ‘synergies’ – between causes of...
September 18, 2019
Anonymous data ... or not!
Personal data are often shared anonymously. But we know that it’s possible to reidentify people. ICTEAM researchers have just developed a model that accurately estimates the probability of a...
June 26, 2019
HR: a changing profession
A team from the UCLouvain Louvain School Management has published a white paper on human resources management in the non-profit sector. These poorly known jobs are at the forefront of...
May 02, 2019
Environment
Rethinking the energy system
As part of the 11-14 March Water and Climate Festival in Louvain-la-Neuve, Science Today is highlighting UCLouvain ecological transition research and researchers. Gauthier Limpens, a PhD...
April 25, 2019
Environment
Drug traces in water
Traces of drugs are in water worldwide. While the impact of such pollution on the environment and human health is still largely unknown, researchers of the Louvain4Water at UCLouvain are...
April 18, 2019
Environment
When soils filter wastewater
In Wallonia, one-tenth of domestic waste water doesn’t pass through a waste water treatment plant. Is it pollution? Not necessarily, because soils can filter and purify wastewater naturally...
April 11, 2019
Environment
Energy transition is rooted in the local
As part of the 11-14 March Water and Climate Festival in Louvain-la-Neuve, Science Today is highlighting UCLouvain ecological transition research and researchers. Julie Hermesse, doctor in...
April 04, 2019
Environment
Solar energy for a circular economy
The SUNRISE project, in which UCLouvain participates, just received €1 million from the European Union. With this sum, for one year, the consortium will establish a road map and...
January 25, 2019
Society
Opening Brussels to everyone
Since 2016, Metrolab, a collective project coordinated by UCLouvain sociologist Mathieu Berger, has analysed our capital from the inside. Funded by European ERDF policy, this ambitious...
March 28, 2019
Environment
Controlling nitrate
Agricultural nitrate has polluted water for decades. Today various techniques make it possible to more effectively control the use of this necessary fertiliser. It’s a much more complex...
March 21, 2019
Environment
Energy transition: what economic impact?
How to continue economic growth in a context of energy transition? Prof. Hervé Jeanmart1 and PhD student Elise Dupont2 try to answer this question by studying the return on renewable...
March 13, 2019
Society
Young people, critical thinking, and the forest
In 2018, the Académie d'Agriculture de France awarded Julie Matagne a silver medal for her thesis on forest literacy. What do young people understand about media coverage of forests? ...
January 28, 2019
Health
South Africa: successful treatment of...
In 2006, South Africa experienced an tuberculosis epidemic that still leaves traces today. WHO quickly put in place recommendations to eradicate the disease. Dr Anandi Martin, a microbiologist at...
January 28, 2019
Society
Managing the post-war period: the European ‘example’?
An article by Valérie Rosoux on reconciliation speeches related to the European Union received the Journal of Contemporary European Studies prize. We took the opportunity to return with her to her...
Previous Society news
October 11, 2018
The eye and the pen
Dr Anne Reverseau is now Research Associate FNRS at UCLouvain. Thanks to this permanent research position she will continue her research on the (close) relationships that many writers have had...
September 20, 2018
The approach fundamental research has been waiting for
The Excellence of Science (EOS) programme, created by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen (FWO), supports fundamental research...
August 29, 2018
Ingrid Falque
On 1 October 2018, Ingrid Falque, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Civilisation, Arts and Letters (INCAL), will officially join the family of FNRS research associates. Passionate...
August 29, 2018
François Massonnet
Climate prediction is his forte . At 32 years old, François Massonnet has just been appointed FNRS research associate. While he has been working on the subject for years, he looks forward to...
August 21, 2018
Environment
An urgent warning
Will the earth’s climate reach a tipping point beyond which the planet will become a ‘hothouse’? It’s a possibility scientists warn of in an article that’s urgent reading.
‘The article, in...
August 09, 2018
Environment
Tracking soybeans
The Trase platform, on which Patrick Meyfroidt and his team of researchers collaborate, is unique: it aims to retrace the channels of the main agricultural products responsible for...
August 20, 2018
Environment
A tool for modernising European agricultural policy
Commissioned by the European Commission (EC) and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Sen4CAP research project, led by Sophie Bontemps and Nicolas Bellemans and supervised by Pierre...
May 29, 2018
Society
Evolution: Cooperation for progress...and knowledge
‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’, says René Rezsohazy, professor of molecular biology at the University of Louvain, citing Theodosius Dobzhansky. But...
May 07, 2018
Environment
Connected objects that last
In 2017, 403.5 million smartphones were sold worldwide. We usually choose one on the basis of technical characteristics, such as camera or operating system quality; we then hope it lasts long...
May 07, 2018
Society
Why we don’t consume ethically
Presented every two years, the inter-university Philippe de Woot Award aims to promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) by recognising a master’s dissertation. Among the three dissertations...
January 09, 2018
Health
Promoting appropriate prescriptions for the elderly
Many people aged 75 or older, including those in nursing and care homes and hospitals, receive inappropriate treatment. This is the research subject of Prof. Anne Spinewine, who on 12 December...
March 22, 2018
Society
A chair on the Europe of Europeans
On 15 February, the Anthropology of Contemporary Europe Chair(1) organised its first thematic day, focusing on the Danube. The new chair, launched in September at UCL, aims to build a...
October 16, 2017
Society
Food: a public commons?
World hunger continues to increase, affecting 777 million people in 2015 and 815 million in 2016. Would it help if we changed the way we look at food in our societies? That’s the idea of José Luis...
September 26, 2017
Environment
Pay to prevent deforestation
To objectively evaluate an anti-deforestation programme, an international team of researchers carried out a randomised study in Uganda, the first of its kind in environmental science. The...
July 11, 2017
Philosophy in Andalusia : older than we thought
Europe has its roots in many influences, including the rational thought that emerged in Andalusia when Muslims occupied most of the Iberian peninsula. Godefroid de Callataÿ, a researcher and...
June 27, 2017
Alain Holeyman, 2017 Coulomb Conference guest speaker
This year, the Comité Français de Mécanique des Sols et de Géotechnique (‘French Committee for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnics’) has invited Alain Holeyman to speak at the Coulomb Conference. The...
June 01, 2017
The university: (still) a man’s world?
While they make up the majority during their studies, the proportion of women decreases as the academic career progresses. A consortium of European universities, including UCL, is studying this...
January 24, 2017
Disasters: robots to the rescue
Imagine an earthquake or nuclear accident disaster area where it’s impossible to send in rescuers without putting their lives at risk. At UCL, Nicolas Van der Noot is looking to robots to do the...
December 21, 2016
Mummies full of surprises
In 2015, the Saint-Luc University Hospital Radiology and Medical Imaging Department, in collaboration with a UCL research team, scanned 25 mummies belonging to the Cinquantenaire Museum, revealing...
December 21, 2016
Memories of the Second World War: Which ones survive?
What memories do the people who lived through the Second World War pass on to their children and grandchildren? Two UCL researchers studied several Belgian families to find out.
The humanities...
September 20, 2016
Gamers, who are you?
When it comes to the players of video games, preconceptions abound. They’re often disturbing stereotypes: the isolated youth with eyes for nothing but his computer, tablet or smartphone. Olivier...
August 11, 2016
How emotional intelligence can make you healthier
Being able to identify, understand, express, manage and use our emotions helps us in so many facets of our lives. According to a recent UCL study, emotional intelligence (EI) can even improve your...
June 28, 2016
Adolescent depression: Can mindfulness prevent it?
Adolescents are of course not immune to feeling blue or even depressed. Researchers are betting on mindfulness as a means of prevention, especially at UCL, a pioneer of child mindfulness. Prof....
June 28, 2016
Flanders-Wallonia: Is youth the answer?
The sometimes tense relations between the two main communities of Belgium is a subject of great interest to Bernard Rimé, a professor emeritus, a researcher at the UCL Psychological Sciences...
June 28, 2016
Better big data analysis for better epidemic management
Using big data to precisely and easily predict an epidemic’s course or a virus’s spread—that’s the seemingly incredible goal of Jean-Charles Delvenne, a researcher at the Mathematical Engineering...
June 28, 2016
Are our teens heroes?
The ‘Avoir 20 ans en 2015’ (‘20 years old in 2015’) project followed 50 teenagers in Belgium, France, Reunion and Canada on their journey toward adulthood. Chloé Colpé, a UCL doctoral student...
May 26, 2016
The language of advanced age
Language use evolves throughout one’s entire life. Ageing-related problems can affect one’s ability to express oneself and complicate communication with others. At UCL, a researcher at the Valibel...
May 13, 2016
Health and undocumented immigrants: a social conundrum
Personal opinions and politics aside, the presence in Belgium of undocumented migrants raises the delicate question of their access to health care. Researchers at the UCL Institute of Health and...
April 25, 2016
Senegal: using big data to anticipate food shortages
Four young researchers of the Environmetrics and Geomatics Laboratory, led by Prof. Pierre Defourny of the UCL Earth and Life Institute, have been recognised by the Massachusetts Institute of...
April 25, 2016
A chair for fighting poverty
Among the actors working to reduce poverty and casualisation, one remains poorly known and underestimated: the social enterprise. A Belgian one, Les Petits Riens, partnered with UCL by funding a...
April 21, 2016
Refugee and immigration crises: at what cost to Belgium?
Anxieties have persisted ever since the arrival of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis on Belgian soil. But the frightful perceptions of the economic effects are erroneous, according to Dr...
April 20, 2016
What happens in the mind of an anxiety sufferer?
In Belgium, between 7 and 10% of the population suffers from anxiety disorder (AD). What exactly goes on in their minds?
There are different types of AD: phobias, OCDs, generalised...
March 22, 2016
Pondering pensions: a new UCL chair
Longer life expectancy and declining birth rates are making it harder for public authorities to sustain pension systems, especially given the fragile state of public finances. To see the situation...
January 04, 2016
Analysing mobile data can save lives!
The proliferation of mobile phones has spawned a new research sector: mobile data analysis. The goal? To study new information concerning users’ social behaviours. In countries of the South, such...
March 22, 2017
Metrolab: winds of change in Brussels
The Metrolab research project aims to support European urban development policies, which in turn could lead to environmental, social and economic improvements in Brussels.
Metrolab is part of a...
March 22, 2017
A better understanding of deglaciation
The work of two Earth and Life Institute researchers has led to a better understanding of glaciation and deglaciation. We now know how variations in earth’s orbit influence the passage from a...
January 31, 2017
Reducing employer costs depends on low-income earners
Will reducing Belgian employer social security taxes—championed by the last two governments as a cure-all for the economy—really be effective? Only if it focuses on low-income earners, say Drs...
January 24, 2017
From the lab to the hospital: medical robotics, a team...
Exoskeletons, microsurgery robots, robotic prostheses—robotics and the medical sector have never complemented each other so well. In 2014, UCL created Louvain Bionics, a centre of expertise unique...
November 10, 2016
Student mission to Mars
‘Mars to earth, come in, Earth.’ UCL students can pronounce these words every April when they take off for the red planet—so to speak—via Mars Society’s Mission to Mars project.
Space...
May 06, 2016
Getting surfers to smile: online emotion detection
Things go fast on the Internet. A surfer might ‘Like’ something but then all of a sudden, at the least bother or confusion, he or she will click that little ‘x’ that closes your site and move on...
May 11, 2017
Unemployment benefits: what happens to the excluded?
Today, when the Belgian authorities determine that an unemployed person isn’t looking hard enough for a job, they can stop paying that person unemployment benefits. What happens then? Does it...